Northern Lights and Midnight Sun

Winter silence

Winter morning in Hallingdal, Norway

Eurasian bullfinch

Māori:

Kalaallit Nunaat:

Haudenosaunee

Nunatsiavut:

Australian Aboriginal:

Torres Strait Islands:

Rapa Nui:

Kurdistan:

Sami:

Ainu:

"A tribal-led nonprofit is creating a network of native bison ranchers that are restoring ecosystems on the Great Plains, restoring native ranchers’ connections with their ancestral land, and restoring the native diet that their ancestors relied on.

Called the Tanka Fund, they coordinate donors and partners to help ranchers secure grazing land access, funds needed to install and repair fencing, increase their herd sizes, and access markets for bison meat across the country.

That’s the human part of the story. But as Dawn Sherman, executive director of the Tanka Fund, told Native Sun News, they’re “buffalo people” and these four-legged, 2,000 lbs. “cousins” are equal-part-protagonists.

The return of the bison means the return of the prairie, one of the three great grassland ecosystems on the planet, of which just 1% remains as it was when the Mayflower arrived.

“Bringing buffalo back to their ancestral homelands is essential to restoring the ecosystem. We know that the buffalo is a keystone species,” said Dawn Sherman, a member of the Lakota, Delaware, Shawnee, and Cree.

“Bringing the buffalo back to the land and to our people, helps restore the ecosystem and everything it supports from the animals to the plants to the people. It’s come full circle. That’s how we see it.”

As Sherman and the Tanka Fund help native ranchers grow their operations, everyone is well aware of the power of the bison to transform the environment: just as nations across Europe are, who are reintroducing wood bison to various ecosystems, for all the same reasons.

Sherman points out the variety of ways in which buffalo anchor the prairie ecosystem. The almost-extinct black-footed ferret, she points out, lived symbiotically with the bison, and with the latter gone, the former followed—nearly.

The long-billed curlew uses bison dung as a disguise to hide nests from predators. Deer, pronghorn antelope, and elk all rely on bison to plow through deep snows and uncover the grasses that these smaller animals can’t reach.

Everywhere the bison hurls its massive body, life springs in the beast’s wake. When bison roll about on the plains, it creates depressions known as wallows. These fill with rainwater and create enormous puddles where amphibians and insects thrive and reproduce. Certain plants evolved to grow in the wet conditions of the wallows which Native Americans harvested for food and medicine.

Native plants evolved under the trampling hooves of millions of bison, and that constant tamping down of the Earth is a key necessity in the spreading of native wildflower seed.

Indeed, Sherman says some of these native ranchers are bringing bison onto lands still visibly affected by the Dust Bowl, and already the animals are acting like a giant wooly cure-all for the land’s ills.

Since 2020, the Tanka Fund, in partnership with the Inter-Tribal Buffalo Council and the Nature Conservancy, has overseen the transfer of 2,300 bison from Nature Conservancy reserves to lands managed by ranchers within the Tanka Fund network.

“[T]he more animals that we can get the more of that prairie we can restore,” said Sherman. “We can help restore the land that has been plowed and has been leased out to cattle ranchers.”"

Ice bubbles, Nordegg and Abraham Lake, Alberta, Canada

Western media:

'16. Hamas affirms that its conflict is with the Zionist project not with the Jews because of their religion. Hamas does not wage a struggle against the Jews because they are Jewish but wages a struggle against the Zionists who occupy Palestine. Yet, it is the Zionists who constantly identify Judaism and the Jews with their own colonial project and illegal entity.'

Leila Khaled, January, 1971.

Niillas Somby is an icon of the Sámi resistance movement. In 1979, he was one of the hunger strikers outside of the Norwegian Parliament building, drawing attention to protests against a hydropower dam near the town of Áltá in the far north of the country. Together with the Kola Peninsula in Russia, the northernmost regions of Norway, Sweden, and Finland constitute Sápmi, the traditional homeland of the Sámi, Europe’s only officially recognized indigenous people.

In 1982, after the Supreme Court of Norway upheld the government’s decision to build the Áltá dam, Somby was one of three people trying to sabotage a bridge leading to the construction site. The action failed, with the bomb they were carrying going off too early. Somby lost an arm and an eye and was facing more than twenty years in prison. With the help of an international network of indigenous activists, he managed to escape to Canada where he was adopted and sheltered by First Nations until the main charges against him were dropped and it was safe for him and his family to return to Norway.